Trifluorochloroethylene (CTFE) is an important special monomer for fluorine-containing high performance materials in which polytrifluorochloroethylene has superior oxygen isolating and low temperature resistant properties and thus is widely used in packaging films for medicine, electronics encapsulation applications and delivery tubes for low temperature materials. Additionally, fluorine-containing coatings with trifluorochloroethylene as the main monomer have superior weather resistant and corrosion resistant properties, and are widely used in building industries. Currently, the global annual output of trifluorochloroethylene is around 10,000 tons, and the primary process for preparing the same is to dechlorine from trifluorotrichloroethane with the action of zinc powder or hydrogen.
Since in the conventional process significant amount of zinc powder will be consumed when zinc powder is used for dechlorination, and meanwhile significant amount of zinc chloride waste residues will be generated, the production cost of trifluorochloroethylene would be increased a lot due to consumption of zinc powder and the need of treatment of the residues. When hydrogen is directly used for dechlorination, an expensive rare metal such as platinum, rhodium or ruthenium would be required as a catalyst, and therefore, the production cost is also relatively high. Meanwhile, hydrogenation by using hydrogen directly tends to result in excessive hydrogenation, and impurities such as trifluoroethylene may be generated, which would result in decrease of yield and purity of the product. The disadvantages of the processes disclosed in patent documents U.S. Pat. No. 2,685,606, U.S. Pat. No. 2,704,777, EP 0416015 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,333,011 have been summarized as above. Generally, the product cost of trifluorochloroethylene in these documents is relatively high, and the yield of product is relatively low, typically only about 85%.